India's courts flounder as dam pressure builds

Friday 10 August 2001 19.46 EDT
First published on Friday 10 August 2001 19.46 EDT

Nargis, the great Indian movie star of the 1950s, who later had a career in politics, once denounced the great film director Satyajit Ray for making films that offered too negative an image of India. In her own movies, she said, she had always celebrated the positive. When asked for an example, she replied, "dams".

Big dams (defined as those over 15 metres high) have long been an essential part of India's technological iconography, and their role in providing water and power to the nation was for a time unquestioned, even unquestionable. Lately, however, there has been "an increasingly confrontational debate about the role that large dams have played in development," to quote the chairman of the World Commission on Dams (WCD), South Africa's education minister, Professor Kader Asmal.

One of the biggest new dams under construction is the Sardar Sarovar Project on the Narmada river in Gujarat, with a proposed final height of 136.5 metres. Among its most vocal opponents is the novelist Arundhati Roy. "Big dams," she says, "have let this country down." She objects to the displacement of more than 200,000 people by rising waters, to the damage to the Narmada Valley's fragile ecosystem, and points, tellingly, to the failure of big dams to deliver what they promised. (India's Bargi dam, for example, irrigates only 5% of the area promised.)

She argues further that while the rural poor are the ones who pay the price for a dam, it is the urban rich who benefit: "80% of rural households [still] have no electricity, 250m people have no access to safe drinking water."

The recent report of the WCD largely supports Roy's arguments. The WCD was set up by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union and based its report on surveys of 125 large dams. (Mysteriously, it was refused permission to visit the Sardar Sarovar Project.) The report blames big dams for increased flooding, damage to farmland, the extinction of freshwater fishes.

It agrees that the benefits of dams go largely to the rich, that many dams fall short of their targets, and that of the 40m to 80m people displaced by worldwide dam building, few have received anything like the compensation they deserve.

Arundhati Roy and the Narmada Valley campaigners have long argued that alternative methods are capable of meeting Gujarat's water needs; the WCD report echoes this view, stressing the need to focus on renewable energy, recycling, better irrigation, and reducing water losses.

The battle over the Narmada dam has been long and bitter. However, there has been a surreal new twist. Arundhati Roy and two leading members of the protest movement, Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan, were accused last December 14 of having viciously attacked five lawyers during a December 13 protest outside the supreme court in Delhi against the court's decision to allow building work on the Sardar Sarovar project to proceed. Roy and Patkar allegedly called on the crowd to kill the lawyers, and Bhushan grabbed one by the hair and also allegedly threatened him with death.

All this happened, observers say, under the unconcerned noses of a large detachment of policemen. The affray somehow passed unrecorded by the film-maker Sanjay Kak, who was covering the demonstra tion with a video camera. And it was subsequently revealed that Bhushan had been somewhere else at the time.

Despite the apparent absurdity of these charges, however, the supreme court decided to entertain the five lawyers' petition, and served the three activists with criminal contempt notices. In doing so, Roy's supporters claim, it ignored its own stipulated rules and procedures: the lawyers' petition was incorrectly filled out, and did not receive, as it should have, the written support of the attorney general. Most important of all, they say, the supreme court did not try to authenticate the claims in the petition, even though video and eyewitness evidence was readily available.

Summoned to court, Arundhati Roy delivered a characteristically trenchant affidavit in which she said that the court's willingness to haul her and her colleagues up before it on such flimsy charges "indicates a disquieting inclination on the part of the court to silence criticism and muzzle dissent, to harass and intimidate those who disagree with it." The supreme court insisted that she withdraw this affidavit; she refused, and now faces contempt of court charges that could send her and her co-defendants to jail. She is, as she told a British journalist, "even deeper in the soup".

What the supreme court of India should realise is that by pursuing Roy, Patkar and Bhushan in this fashion, it places itself before the court of world opinion. Not long ago the US supreme court disgraced itself internationally by carrying out the judicial coup that made George W Bush "president", and its members know that the decision they made will stain their reputations for ever. (Two authoritative new books, by Alan Dershowitz and Vincent Bugliosi, leave no doubt that the US supremes made a politically motivated judgment that looks like very bad law indeed.)

Can it be that the supreme court of the "world's largest democracy" will emulate that of the world's most powerful country by revealing itself to be biased - in this case against free speech - and prepared to act as the "muscle" for a particular interest group - in this case the powerful coalition of political and financial interests behind big dams?

Only by abandoning its pursuit of Arundhati Roy and the Narmada Valley campaigners can the supreme court escape such a judgment. It should do so at once.